ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the principles of sustainability in the context of energy engineering. This chapter can be used as a stand-alone supplement to any engineering course or the introduction to an energy engineering course. Section 1.1 gives a historical review of sustainability principles. Section 1.2 presents the critical issues for sustainability: population, water, food and growth, and the relationships between these systems and energy use. Section 1.3 presents some context for the complex nature of sustainable energy by looking at the world energy system of the past, present, and future. Section 1.4 explains some of the most important considerations you must understand in order to effectively deal with sustainability in engineering, including energy return on energy invested (EROI), the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), efciency, environmental impacts, social values, depletion, measures of well-being, and the orders of magnitude that separate different end uses and sources of energy. Section 1.5 explains the most promising of all sustainable energy strategies-reducing energy demand by improving efciency, changing behavior, and adaptive design. Section 1.6 deals with the sustainability of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and other emissions, and the prospects for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Section 1.7 gives an overview of the technology and prospects for the sustainability of power generation from uranium. Section 1.8 reviews the technology, history, current status, and future prospects for renewable resources including geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, biomass, and the ocean. Section 1.9 discusses the prospects for hydrogen, and Section 1.10 gives an introduction to energy system modelling using readily available software.
